There are many different technologies for processing forms. A number of these technologies handle forms in an automated fashion. Because of the automated processing, it is possible that errors may be made in identifying user entered data on the forms. In fact, such errors often do occur. Existing optical character recognition (OCR) based image/forms processing systems require substantial amount of manual transcription to achieve the accuracy necessary for entry into most business databases. The labor and system costs are borne by the receiving organization. Furthermore, errors in the transcription result in miscommunications and delays that cost both the sender of the form and the receiver. Thus, all these processes appear to be open loop in that the individual providing the form never validates the data.
Paper user interfaces have been described that allow commands to be executed via fax or copier. However, these interfaces also have the same limitation in that they do not provide any validation step that allows the recognized input to be validated before the operations take place.